A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF MODALITY IN THE COVID-19 ADDRESSES BY PRESIDENT AKUFFO ADDO

Hamidu Alhassan, Aikins Addae, Millicent Akosua Quarcoo, Godwin Kusi Danquah

Abstract


This study aims at investigating the most used modal verbs and their semantic implications on the COVID-19 addresses delivered by Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo, the president of the Republic of Ghana. In all, 96,784 running words were culled from thirty (30) presidential addresses to build a specialised corpus for the study. Using the Antconc corpus software, 3.5.9 version, five (5) modal auxiliaries, that is, epistemic and non-epistemic (root) modal verbs were found to constitute the most frequently occurring modals in the presidential COVID-19 addresses. The analysis revealed five (5) thematic areas which these modal verbs covered - willingness, possibility, prediction, ability, and probability. These thematic areas give an indication that the president showed more commitment to dealing with the pandemic. This was evidenced by the number of times the president used non epistemic modal verbs which demonstrate ability, willingness, and possibility in handling the coronavirus pandemic. Again, the corpus revealed that the president’s measures were on the back of some form of his existing knowledge in dealing with the pandemic.

 

Article visualizations:

Hit counter


Keywords


AntConc, corpus, COVID-19, epistemic, non-epistemic, modality, root

Full Text:

PDF

References


Abidin, C., Lee, J., Barbetta, T., & Miao, W. S. (2020). Influencers and COVID-19: Reviewing key issues in press coverage across Australia, China, Japan, and South Korea. Media. International. Australia. Advanced Publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X20959838

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, London: Longman.

Baker, P. (2014). Using Corpora to Analyze Gender, London: Bloomsbury.

Chen, M., & Xie, Q. (2020). Hedges in news reports on the COVID-19: Taking People’s Daily as an example. Journal of Hubei University of Economics (Humanities and Social Sciences), 17(9), 100−103.

Chen, X., & Hu, J. (2021). Going global: The successful link of IELTS and Aptis to China’s Standards of English language ability (CSE). International Journal of English Linguistics, 11(1), 1−9. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v11n1p1

Chen, X., & Hu, J. (2019). Evolution of U.S. presidential discourse over 230 years: A psycholinguistic perspective. International Journal of English Linguistics, 9(4), 28. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v9n4p28

Chen, X., Yan, Y., & Hu, J. (2019). A corpus-based study of Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s linguistic styles. International Journal of English Linguistics, 9(3), 13−22. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v9n3p13

Chaplin, Steve (2020). “COVID-19: a brief history and treatments in development”. Prescriber 31/5: 23–28

Coates, J. and Leech, G. (1980). The meanings of the modals in modern British and American English, York Papers in Linguistics, 8: 23–34.

Coates, J. (1983). The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries, London: Croom Helm.

Downing, A. and Locke, P. (1992). A University Course in English Grammar, New York: Prentice Hall.

Debnath, R., & Bardhan, R. (2020). India nudges to contain COVID-19 pandemic: A reactive public policy analysis using machine-learning based topic modelling. Plos One, 15(9). Advanced Publication. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238972

Ding, J., & Liao, Y. (2001). Review on the critical discourse analysis. Contemporary Linguistics, 4, 305−310. https://10.3969/j.issn.1007-8274.2001.04.006

Essam, B. A., & Abdo, M. S. (2020). How do Arab tweeters perceive the COVID-19 pandemic? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. Advanced Publication. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-020-9715-6

Flowerdew, J. (2013). Discourse in English Language Education, New York: Routledge.

Goniewicz, Krzysztof, Amir Khorram-Manesh, Attila J. Hertelendy, Mariusz Goniewicz, Katarzyna Naylor, Frederick M. Burkle Jr. (2020). Current response and management decisions of the European Union to the COVID-19 outbreak: A review. Sustainability 12/9, 3838. Available at https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/9/3838/htm. Accessed 09.09.2020.

Hu, J. (2014). An analysis of the design process of a language learning management system. Control and Intelligent Systems, 42(1), 80−86. https://doi.org/10.2316/Journal.201.2014.1.201-2534

Kennedy, G. (1998). An introduction to corpus linguistics. Harlow: Longman

Kjellmer, G. (1994). A dictionary of English Collocations: Based on the Brown Corpus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Language Teaching (pp. 25-43). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jing, Y., Li, B., Chen, N., Li, X., & Hu, J. (2015). The discrimination of learning styles by bayes-based statistics: An extended study on ILS system. Control and Intelligent Systems, 43(2), 68−75. https://doi.org/10.2316/Journal.201.2015.2.201-2666

Joharry, S. A., & Turiman, S. (2020). Examining Malaysian public letters to editor on COVID-19 pandemic: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Gema Online Journal of Language Studies, 20(3), 242−260. https://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2020-2003-14

Lawrence, A. (2013). AntConc: Design and Development of a Freeware Corpus: International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, 27-33. Lancaster University, UK.

Li, F. (2017). Critical discourse analysis of Sino-US climate change news report: A corpus-based analysis. Journal of News Research, 8(12), 59−61. https://CNKI:SUN:XWDK.0.2017-12-035ijel.ccsenet.org International Journal of English Linguistics Vol. 11, No. 2; 2021

Matthiessen, C. M. I. M., Teruya, K. and Lam, M. (2010). Key Terms in Systemic Functional Linguistics, London: Continuum.

Ngoc, P. N. H., Hai, N. M., & Tuan, L. A. (2020). Effect of the social distancing measures on the spread of COVID-19 in 10 highly infected countries. Science of the Total Environment, 742. Advanced Publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140430

Ngula, R. S. (2017). ‘Corpus Methods in Language Studies’ in D. D. Kuupole (ed.) Perspectives on conducting and reporting research in the Humanities, pp 205 – 223, Cape Coast: University of Cape Coast Press

Ngula, R. S. (2018). A Corpus-Based study of the phraseological pattern It + V-link + ADJ + That Clause in L1 and L2 Expert Academic Writing. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, vol7, No.5

Odlum, M., Cho, H., Broadwell, P., Davis, N., Patrao, M., Schauer, D., … Yoon, S. (2020). Application of topic modeling to tweets as the foundation for health disparity research for COVID-19. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 272, 24−27. https://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI200484

Palmer, F. (1990). Modality and the English Modals, (2nd edn.) London: Longman.

Prieto-Ramos, F., Pei, J., & Cheng, L. (2020). Institutional and news media denominations of COVID-19 and its causative virus: Between naming policies and naming politics. Discourse & Communication, 14(6), 635−652. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481320938467 Thu, T. P. B.,

Piller, Ingrid, Jie Zhang, Jia Li (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua 39/5: 503–515.

Sweetser, E. E. (1982). ‘Root and epistemic modality: causality in two worlds’, Berkeley Linguistic Society Papers, 8: 484–507.

Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Politics, Ideology, and Discourse, in Brown, K. (ed), The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press, pp. 728-740.

Wei, Y., Yang, Q., Chen, J., & Hu, J. (2018). The exploration of a machine learning approach for the assessment of learning styles changes. Mechatronic Systems and Control, 46(3), 121−126. https://doi.org/10.2316/Journal.201.2018.3.201-2979

Xiao, Y., Li, Y., & Hu, J. (2019). Construction of the Belt and Road Initiative in Chinese and American media: A critical discourse analysis based on self-built corpora. International Journal of English Linguistics, 9(3), 68−77. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v9n3p68

Xiao, Y., Liu, Y., & Hu, J. (2019). Regression analysis of ICT impact factors on early adolescents’ reading proficiency in five high-performing countries. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 1646. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01646

Yang, C. W., Sha, D. X., Liu, Q., Li, Y., Lan, H., Guan, W. W., … Ding, A. (2020). Taking the pulse of COVID-19: A spatiotemporal perspective. International Journal of Digital Earth, 13(10), 1186−1211. https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2020.1809723

Yang, Y. F., & Chen, X. C. (2020). Globalism or nationalism? The paradox of Chinese official discourse in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak. Journal of Chinese Political Science, Advanced Publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-020-09697-1

Zeng, Y., & Xie, T. (2020). Comparative study on news reports of COVID-19 between China and the United States. Journal of Mudanjiang University, 29(09), 77−80. https://doi.org/10.15907/j.cnki.23-1450.2




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejals.v6i2.457

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The research works published in this journal are free to be accessed. They can be shared (copied and redistributed in any medium or format) and\or adapted (remixed, transformed, and built upon the material for any purpose, commercially and\or not commercially) under the following terms: attribution (appropriate credit must be given indicating original authors, research work name and publication name mentioning if changes were made) and without adding additional restrictions (without restricting others from doing anything the actual license permits). Authors retain the full copyright of their published research works and cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms are followed.

Copyright © 2018-2023. European Journal of Applied Linguistics Studies (ISSN 2602 - 0254 / ISSN-L 2602 - 0254). All rights reserved.

This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library. All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms. All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and standards formulated by Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) and Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Copyrights of the published research works are retained by authors.